Saturday, July 6, 2013

Better than saving the world

I know I’ve
quoted it here before, but one of my favourite lines of film criticism is David
Thomson’s comment about Howard Hawks, that it’s the principle of Hawks’ cinema
“that men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world.” He
goes on to say “that Hawks attends to such small things because he is the
greatest optimist that the cinema has produced,” and that “the optimism comes
out of a knowledge of failure and is based on the virtues and warmth in people that
go hand-in-hand with their shortcomings.” Depending on your view of cinema, or
of Hawks, you might not think that sounds like much, at least not compared to
saving the world, and indeed it doesn’t, if you value “spectacle” and “escaping
from your troubles” and the other heavy-welded components of the Hollywood
brand above all other considerations. But is there a greater form of pessimism,
I wonder, than submitting to an endless stream of coldly peril-ridden
mythologies?

Frances Ha

Thomson’s line
came back to me as I watched Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, one of the year’s most optimistic films – in the sense
laid out above – and one of its most enchanting. Broader similarities with
Hawks might not be self-evident, although it does provoke the thought that
modern-day New York as occupied by young “arty” types – the territory of Lena
Dunham’s Girls (with which the film
shares a key cast member) and of a thousand low-budget movies – might now
constitute a sort of genre framework in the way that westerns and private eyes
once did. That is, whether or not what we’re watching is particularly
representative of any documentable reality, it provides a wonderfully fertile
framework in which to plot human interactions. I like Girls very much, but Baumbach’s work in Frances Ha is so subtle and skillful, it almost makes that show,
and his own previous work, look heavy-handed (it also solidifies my
reservations about Richard Linklater’s Before
Midnight, which I wrote about here two weeks ago).

Much
of the credit certainly belongs to the lead actress Greta Gerwig, who wrote the
film with Baumbach, and somewhere into the line entered into a much-covered
relationship with him. Her Frances is 27 years old, poor, but as a friend
points out, not really poor – although her actual income may be minimal, the
supplementary momentum of favours, borrowed apartments, maxed-out credit cards
and so forth still has a while to run. As the film begins, she’s sharing an
apartment with her best friend Sophie, delighting in the easy familiarity of
their relationship, and imagining it might continue indefinitely. But Sophie
suddenly moves out, and then acquires a serious boyfriend, and her life heads
off on a trajectory which threatens to exclude Frances altogether; Frances
falters personally, and professionally (she’s trying to make it as a dancer),
and enters what seems capable of becoming a serious downward spiral.

Weekend in Paris

The
film proceeds through a gentle, often almost subliminal series of displacements
and shifts, of mood and relationships and emotional structures. Its
centerpiece, perhaps, is Frances’ weekend in Paris – a wickedly disastrous
experience, so beautifully rendered it could constitute a short film in itself,
while avoiding all sense of a calculated set-piece (even though it is that). But
throughout, Baumbach avoids the over-emphatic rhythms that often mark even
better films. Writing about a central dinner scene in Before Midnight, I noted how “the dialogue is all nicely spaced and distributed, with none of
the digressions and dead zones of real social intercourse: everyone talks
entirely in comic or metaphysical zingers (or both).” Baumbach may well have
been subject to similar limitations in the past, but seldom here.

For another point
of reference, Frances Ha has a dinner
scene too, where Frances bemuses her hosts with her incoherent digressions. As
I saw it during the weekend when The Heat
was the number one film, I couldn’t help thinking how such a scene would play
out in a Melissa McCarthy film, the prevailing mood shattered by imaginative
obscenities and knowingly grotesque sexual innuendos. It might be funny, but it
wouldn’t reveal a thing about character, and could never allow the scene’s
surprising conclusion, where Frances suddenly shifts into an oddly beautiful
reverie about love, all but taking away the breath of her previously skeptical
hosts. Her imagery in that scene sets up a key moment toward the end, in a way
that supports a theme of growth and adaptation – Frances achieves, if only in
passing, her romantic dream, but in a context, and bearing a meaning, more
tempered and complex than she could previously have imagined.

In addition to
the trip to Paris, the film has numerous references to the French new wave, and
to Francois Truffaut in particular – we glimpse a poster for one of his films,
and his key actor Jean-Pierre Leaud gets a mention; Baumbach shoots it all in
gorgeous black and white (which also brings some of Woody Allen’s peak-period
comedies to mind at times). I don’t know whether Baumbach finds these links a
specific source of artistic strength, but if nothing else they place Frances Ha in a tradition of eternally
provocative and fulfilling cinema, created out of relative poverty of means,
ventilated by a rejection of deadening conventions.

Classic Gerwig

Part of that
tradition was always its greater sexual frankness, but funnily enough, Baumbach
keeps things remarkably decorous in that respect: there’s a certain amount of
sex, but no hint of any on screen – indeed, this absence (and the accompanying
suggestion that Frances may be fundamentally undateable) is key to the film’s
effect. Although it’s certainly a contemporary movie, there’s something rather
out-of-time to this courtliness (judged as anthropology, it might be a flaw
that smartphones aren’t as prominent as they should be, not that they’re
absent), which adds to that sense of genre filmmaking, ably weaving reality and
myth.

The film, then,
seems to me a considerable delight, and confirms all the buzz about Gerwig as
the truest heir to classic Hollywood – only a moderate beauty by magazine cover
standards, but with a beyond-beguiling resourcefulness that might cause you to
redefine your standards in such things. Frances
Ha ought to be the talk of this supposedly film-loving city, but when I
went with my wife to see it at 5 pm on the second Sunday of its release, there
were only three other people in the place. The number one picture, as I
mentioned, was The Heat, which at
least by all accounts isn’t a film about saving the world, but nevertheless may
constitute another step closer to destroying it, culturally speaking. What can
you do, except close with an ambiguous ha?

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).